Moving forward

Blame it on Shonda and Elizabeth… We all know that I love Ms. Gilbert for the brilliance that is Eat Pray Love. That book helped me come alive after years of just floating. It spoke to me and many others in ways that no other book had done, and I am forever grateful that she presented her truth in such a way that it seemed natural to look inside myself to see what I had in there. My copy of EPL has so many notes and highlights that just a glance will give anyone an insight to who I am.

Shonda Rhimes, well, she’s new for me. I was never a fan of Grey’s Anatomy, mainly because of the unfortunate presence of Ms. Heigl, so there’s a great deal of Shondaland that I have not seen. I am a fan of Scandal, but I never really focused on who was writing those amazing storylines. It was the actors that presented them that thrilled me. That is, until, I listened to the audiobook version of The Year of Yes, which I first found incredibly annoying until I realized that the person reading the book — Shonda — sounded exactly like me, and her thinking was so much like mine that there was simply no way that she wouldn’t have some knowledge that I needed.

The fact is, both of these books and authors resonated in my life because they stepped from behind their curtains to share the truths of their respective journeys of self-discovery, and I am a person who craves to get to the bottom of the truth of who I am and how I can be the best version of myself. What I’ve learned is that there is no “best version” of me without the honest look at what my life looks like, and how that makes me feel. I will not stop trying to be the best version of Reese, and this is another step forward in that journey.

I love hard. If there is confusion about what that means, read page 65 of EPL. I grew up in a loving home with wonderful people, and that’s the foundation of my life. There was no tragic childhood trauma for me. I was a happy kid with happy circumstances that were expected to lead to an inevitably happy life.

Of late I have been struggling to maintain that so-called happy life. There have been several big, grown-up, adults situations that seriously compromised that so-called happy life, and, without going into great detail, I can say that the wounds are deep, the scars are visible, and the pain does not really go away. My focus has been to find a way to cope rather to find a way to heal. Until recently, that is.

Life can be deeply challenging to navigate. Just when you get used to things being one way, the wind blows or the car spins or the dog bites or the computer freezes, and then everything has to change. And sure, I’ve read Who Moved My Cheese countless times, and I know that change is inevitable, but sometimes, I just want to go back to way I was, the way I felt in my perfectly uneventful happy life. Of course, I was under the age of 10, so things were much different. Still, it is change that inspires us all to grow, and so I’m working on finding my way to healing, not just coping.

And this process is not easy, so I have enlisted the help of a “healer”. Okay, she’s a therapist, but I call her the healer because she listens which makes me listen, and I see myself moving beyond the coping stage. I look forward to the healing and the growth.